Hard Cover Page 6

TEN

  I threw on some clothes and hit the stairs. If somebody was about to jack my vehicle, I’d lose that and whatever equipment I’d left in there. And it was too late to go hunting for replacements. By the time I got re-kitted, Tzorekov and his buddy would be long gone and the tracker would be as good as useless.

  I walked past the reception desk, where a night porter was watching a small television and blatantly ignoring what was happening right outside the building. A camera monitor on the wall showed a nice view of some bushes at the side of the hotel, well away from the current action. He looked surprised to see me, then alarmed, his mouth opening and closing rapidly when he saw I was going outside. That told me he was in on the deal. I left him flapping and slapped the button to open the door, and stepped into the night.

  The three other men had now joined the one at my car. One man moved to stand by the trunk, while another hovered by an Audi two spaces away and the fourth wandered off towards the outer edges of the parking lot with a cell phone glued to his ear.

  It was a neat set-up and well-rehearsed, each man with an assigned role to play. On the signal to go from the lookout with the cell phone, the man by the car door would open it, the guy by the trunk would jump in, start the car and drive it away. The break-in specialist would then move on past the Audi and open an older Volvo next to it, and his pal would drive that away. All the time, the lookout would be ready to run interference on anybody who happened along.

  Somewhere nearby I was betting there would be a car transporter, ready to take anything these guys could lift. They weren’t playing sophisticated or going for the expensive vehicles; that was obvious by the way they’d ignored the Audi and a couple of BMWs in the same lot and gone for the beat-up but still very useful and saleable UAZ. These guys were working on quantity; quick to steal and easy to sell, they undoubtedly had a dealer lined up ready to move the cars on within hours of being lifted. It was the crude end of the business, but at six to eight cars in one sortie, all taken within twenty minutes, it was easier than stealing one high-end vehicle with anti-theft systems and a possible tracking device and getting peanuts for their trouble.

  ‘Hey.’ The international language of ‘Hey, what the fuck are you doing with my wheels?’

  The four men froze. They hadn’t expected anybody to be up and about this late; even less had they figured on anybody challenging them while they went about their business. Hell, what idiot hotel guest faces down a gang of car thieves in the middle of the night?

  The man at the door to my car was the first to react, but he was quite calm about it. Or maybe he didn’t recognize real opposition when he saw it. He signalled to his pal by the trunk to dump me in the bushes and turned back to opening the door.

  I let Trunk get right up close, then double-stepped and body-checked him low down, hitting him hard with my shoulder and lifting him off his feet. He grunted once and hit the ground on his head. He didn’t get up. I carried on moving, which put me close to Door, who looked amazed to see I’d got past his pal in one piece. He spun round to face me, bringing up his hand, and I caught a glimmer of light shining off steel. A knife man. Luckily for me he was at a disadvantage by being between two vehicles, and couldn’t manoeuvre for more space, which knife fighters like to do, if only because it looks good.

  I waited for him to commit with the blade, slapped his hand aside and punched him hard in the throat. He gagged and tried to breathe, which is not so easy when you’ve taken a hit like that. For good measure I bounced his head off the roof of the UAZ and heard the knife clatter away in the darkness.

  Two down.

  A rush of footsteps told me the man by the Audi was coming in fast, so I turned to greet him. He was trying to untangle something from his coat pocket while he ran. I took that as a sign of intent and ran to meet him. It’s the last thing an aggressor expects, especially when accompanied by a trio of buddies. It’s simply not supposed to go down like that. He made the mistake of still trying to get whatever he was carrying out of his pocket while simultaneously throwing a wild punch at my head. That was never going to work.

  I took the hand he offered and let his own forward momentum do the rest. He glanced off my hip and landed on his back with enough force to crack the concrete. To be fair, he tried to get up, but his body wasn’t in it. Just to make sure I followed him down and slammed a palm-heel into the side of his head. He grunted and stopped moving.

  Number four was nowhere to be seen, but I heard the sound of footsteps running away along the street.

  I walked back to the hotel and found the night porter staring at me with his mouth open.

  ‘You saw that?’ I said. ‘Any of it?’ I pointed at the monitor, which still showed the bushes.

  ‘No, sir.’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing. I see nothing, I …’ He stopped speaking, no doubt wondering if I was going to call the cops.

  ‘That’s good,’ I told him, and stepped up real close, which made him shrink away. ‘You keep it that way, you hear? Otherwise I’ll come back and see you.’

  He nodded, and I hoped he was more scared of me than he was of his pals.

  ELEVEN

  Evgeniy Koroleg was in an early-morning meeting listening to plans for the replacement of a new gas pipeline damaged by the fighting in southern Ukraine, when he felt his cell phone buzz in his breast pocket. He signalled for the others to continue and took the call. It was Broz Scechin in London.

  ‘Yes. Speak.’ At least this promised to be a little more interesting than engineering problems and broken gas pipes.

  ‘Tzorekov has already left London.’

  ‘What?’ Koroleg spoke more sharply than he’d intended, and noted the sudden lull in conversation around the table. ‘Wait one minute,’ he told Scechin, and made a rolling motion with his hand to continue without him and stood up and left the room. Whatever else he did today, this would take priority.

  Once he was back in his office he kicked the door shut and demanded, ‘How did you not know of this before?’

  ‘He laid a false trail,’ said Scechin. ‘He even fooled his office staff. He claimed he had a bad back and said he was working from home. But I now know he travelled from London Heathrow to Paris, then to Frankfurt and on to Saint Petersburg, arriving yesterday evening.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I discovered the ruse when a security cop at Pulkovo thought he recognized Arkady Gurov leaving the arrivals hall. He knew of Gurov from a few years ago – they served together for a while. He had no reason to suspect Gurov of anything but reported it on his daily log as a sighting of interest, as he was required to do.’ He added slyly, ‘I took the precaution of having Pulkovo security office send me their daily summaries along with passenger lists and reports for the past three days.’

  Koroleg ignored the hint for praise. The man was doing what he was paid for. ‘And?’

  ‘Gurov wasn’t listed.’

  ‘Of course he wasn’t. The man’s not an idiot – he’ll be using false papers. Give me a minute.’ He took a tour of his office to think, this time ignoring the view across Kutuzovskiy Avenue. This news had suddenly shrunk his world to a bubble within his office, pushing out all other thoughts. Where Tzorekov went, so did Gurov, he knew that. And what might have been a vague plan, an idle boast in the mind of an old man with mawkish dreams of his homeland and maybe an egotistical sense of his own position in the world, had now morphed into a reality he didn’t want to contemplate. Yet he had to face up to it. There was too much to lose if he ignored it.

  Arkady Gurov. He’d never met the man, but knew enough about his background from the extensive file he’d had built on Tzorekov and his entourage. Attached like a limpet to his boss’s every move, he was almost the antithesis of the public perception of hulking KGB/FSB officers. Slim and boyish, almost effete, he looked unobtrusive and could no doubt slip by unnoticed in a crowd. Yet more by luck than skill, he’d been spotted by somebody who knew him. He swore, forgetting he was still holding the phone.

&n
bsp; ‘Sir?’

  ‘If Gurov is here, then Tzorekov is, also. They will have been on the same flight. If not, he won’t be far behind. Find out what names they were using. Check the passenger lists from Heathrow through Paris to Frankfurt and Pulkovo and pull up any names appearing on all four.’ He knew it might be a wasted exercise, since both men had probably switched to fresh papers by the time they left the airport. But any action was better than none.

  ‘Yes, sir. Anything else?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Thank you, Scechin. Good work.’

  He disconnected and this time went to the window, finding the breath sticking in his chest. Solving problems involving hundreds of miles of pipelines, of contracts and schedules and workforces in hazardous areas – all that was relatively simple compared to what he knew lay before him. Scechin had done as much as he was able in providing this information; but now Koroleg needed some bodies closer to home to do a different kind of job. This matter was in danger of getting beyond his means to deal with. He dialled a number and waited. It was picked up and a man’s gravelly voice answered.

  ‘You’re not calling me to discuss the weather, I trust?’

  ‘No. I’m not.’ Koroleg breathed more easily now. The man on the other end of the line was a fixer by nature and an industrialist by chance. Built like a bear and twice as tricky, Victor Simoyan was one of the new breed, like Koroleg, who had found fortune inside the country rather than seeking more by taking their wealth outside. Simoyan ran one of the fastest-growing armaments development companies in Russia, and had the ears of those who mattered. If there was a person who shared Koroleg’s own fears about the danger Tzorekov represented, Simoyan was one of them. A sudden reversal in the race to build more arms would see his fortunes crushed in more ways than one. He had invested heavily in new manufacturing facilities and there were rumours that he had been forced to borrow heavily from some highly questionable sources, of the kind who would not wait long for loan repayments to be made, no matter how well-connected the borrower might be.

  Dead was dead, even in a fancy suit and a big office.

  The positive side to Simoyan was that he had, over the past years, harvested connections running deep inside the military and intelligence world, and made no secret of his belief in taking action and not leaving matters to chance. Koroleg’s reach by comparison was far more commercial by nature, while Simoyan could get things done that required an entirely different kind of contact.

  ‘Well, don’t keep me in suspense, Evgeniy. I’m not getting any younger.’

  ‘The problem I told you about? It’s arrived.’

  ‘What?’ Simoyan swore beneath his breath and Koroleg heard a chair creak as the big man sat forward. ‘That’s not good. Where is he?’

  ‘That I don’t know. He was at Pulkovo yesterday evening with a man named Arkady Gurov – his security man. They could be anywhere by now.’ Like heading for the lakes, he thought, and maybe one lake in particular. He wondered where Putin was and made a mental note to check the president’s itinerary over the next few days. Surely the man couldn’t possibly think of meeting with Tzor—

  ‘It’s true, they could be,’ Simoyan agreed pragmatically, interrupting his thoughts. ‘But all is not lost. They must have hired a vehicle from the airport. I’ll have someone pull up the security videos from the rental agencies. That will tell us when and the plate number. He could have purchased a map – you know how sketchy satellite signals can be. It might give us a clue where he went.’

  It was something Koroleg should have thought of; he could have used Scechin. But he was happy to let Simoyan deal with it; the man was clever and knew all the tricks. Thinking of ways of gaining access to information was as normal as breathing for him, and he would know who to go to without wasting time. If Tzorekov or his minder had hired a car, pictures of one or both will have been on a hard drive somewhere, waiting to be accessed.

  Damn. Could it really be this simple? Was it a problem solved?

  ‘I’ll get a team together,’ Simoyan continued. ‘I take it we want him found, right?’

  ‘Found, yes.’ Koroleg felt almost breathless at the speed with which things were moving. From hearing the information provided by Scechin just minutes ago, to now hearing that a team would be assembled. A team … to do what? He really didn’t want to think about that side of things, although he knew they would all have to, eventually. ‘We should tell the others. Get their opinions first.’

  ‘Share the responsibility, you mean?’ Simoyan chuckled, and Koroleg had an instant image of the man, larger than life in his vast office, already building a picture of what had to be done and who he could trust to go with him. Simoyan could read minds like no other and understood the psychology of covert groups and the way they thought.

  ‘It makes sense. You and I are not the only ones who would be affected by this.’

  ‘What – that a certain person might be persuaded to have a reversal of attitude? Damn right we’re not.’ Simoyan cleared his throat as if dislodging Putin’s name where it had got stuck. ‘Very well. I will call them together for a video conference tonight – no, this afternoon. Make sure you come. I’ll get Solov to attend in person as well; we need him to influence any doubters.’ Simoyan’s office was in an old printing works in the Mozhaysky District a few miles away in the suburbs. It was neither smart nor especially prestigious, but it was his own fiefdom where he liked to hold court and pretend he was a man of the people. It was also far enough out of the city to remain off the radar of news media and security people alike, especially useful for gatherings of the kind Simoyan was now planning.

  ‘What is this team you talk of?’

  ‘Four men should do it. I’ll get them on standby. I know a few good men who are looking for work.’ He grunted. ‘Don’t worry – they’re highly trained and know what to expect. They’re also trustworthy as far as it goes and … untraceable.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Koroleg sometimes found Simoyan’s convoluted way of expressing himself like listening to experimental music: painful and impossible to fully comprehend, and in the end, being not much wiser.

  ‘It means what it says; they will do the job and disappear.’

  ‘But we haven’t decided anything yet.’

  ‘Not yet. But we will, once I’ve spoken to the others. All we need to do then is give them the green light and let them loose.’

  TWELVE

  It was just after six in the morning when I saw a slim figure emerge from the hotel across the way. The sky was a dense mass of brooding cloud cover dumping a curtain of rain across the parking lot, making it hard to get a clear view. But I recognized Arkady Gurov’s walk as the bodyguard took a tour around the lot, checking the place out before walking across to the Touareg, shoulders hunched against the downpour.

  I threw on a dark green waterproof coat and grabbed my bag, keeping an eye on Gurov as he checked the car over. He was good; he made it look natural, bending to check the tyres, at one point pretending to put his ear to one of the side walls as if listening to a slow puncture; but I knew he was peering under the vehicle for any additions made since last night.

  He evidently failed to see the tracker and I gave a sigh of relief. He stood up, then opened the door and climbed in. A puff of fumes from the exhaust, followed by a single flick of the wipers as a signal, and Tzorekov walked out of the hotel to join him. Unlike last night the banker looked surprisingly spry and no longer shuffling along like an old man.

  I had to give him ten out of ten for a convincing act getting through the airport.

  Both men, I noted, were dressed in similar clothing; waterproof jackets and pants like those used by hunters and weekenders, walking boots with thick soles, and waxed caps. They were carrying small bags only, and I figured they must have kept a reservation and left their travel clothes at the hotel for their return trip.

  By the time I got downstairs and out to my car, they were turning onto the access road to the elevated section of the highway
. I watched to make sure they were heading up the ramp and not into the city, then followed at a discreet distance, merging into the mountain of spray being thrown up by the traffic thundering by.

  I plugged in the phone and switched on the tracking app, and watched a little red dot heading east. For a while this might be the only connection I had with the two Russians, and I was anxious not to lose it.

  There were lots of trucks about, taking advantage of an early start to circumnavigate the city before the smaller commuter traffic began to clog up the roads. That and the heavy rain made following the Touareg easy enough without being seen, but the downside was not knowing whether anybody was on my tail, hiding behind the spray blanking out the road behind me.

  I focussed on the road ahead and decided that I couldn’t obsess about what I couldn’t see; that way was madness. If a tail did materialize I would deal with it.

  Without knowing where the two Russians were going, I knew their choice of routes was fairly limited. Saint Petersburg was located close to the southwestern corner of the vast Lake Ladoga, more an inland sea than a lake. A number of smaller lakes were situated in the area, one of them Lake Komsomolskoye, where Putin and his friends had built dachas – the so-called Ozero (lake) Cooperative.

  If they took the northern circular highway close to the city, it meant they were probably heading for the area west of Lake Ladoga which also housed Lake Komsomolskoye. But their actual destination could be anywhere to the north right up to the border with Finland, although I thought that was unlikely. As controlling as he was, Putin was in a difficult situation; if he did contemplate meeting with his old instructor and mentor, such was the paranoia of political states such as Russia, he couldn’t simply disappear from sight for long without a lot of speculation from local and foreign media alike.

  Tzorekov’s alternative direction was to turn east along the E105 and head towards the smaller Lake Onega, swinging north from there. Either way led to a vast area of countryside and a limited network of roads.